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"Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites."
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Exlpore more Duty quotes
"There should ne'er be a timeWhen a duty or dimeDoth outshineThe importance of family."
"People do not know what good deeds are. It is udaya karma,unfolding effects of past karma; that makes them do the deeds. The prakruti, the relative self, forces them to do them. What is your own thing [effort] in that? Doing good deeds; that too is mandatory (farajiyat)!"
"The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls."
"The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years."
"You and I, we must carry on, Gemma. I cannot afford the luxury of love. I must marry well. And now I must look after you. It is my duty.""If you wish to suffer, you do so of your own free will, not on my behalf. Or Father's or Grandmama's or anyone's. You are a fine physician, Thomas. Why is that not enough?""Because it isn't," he says with a rare candor. "Only this and the hope of nothing more? A quiet respectability with no true greatness or heroism in it, with only my reputation to recommend me. So you see, Gemma, you are not the only one who cannot rule her own life."
"The most difficult challenge an honest man will ever face is having to choose between duty and love.One creates a man of honorable character-a life worth dying for.The other creates a vulnerable soul that madly yearns for either death or immortality."
"You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business.They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue."
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature."
"There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe."
"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."
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